BSF’s human rights violations – why is India turning a blind eye?

An incredibly disturbing video of a Bangladeshi man being physically and verbally abused by a group of BSF men has failed to shake India’s otherwise raucous middle-class from its armchair-revolutionary existence.

The video aired on January 18 and some TV channels showed it, but soon after, it sank without a trace. Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s India site hoped to reclaim some of the attention often lavished on India’s thin skins by posting a story on the BSF torture. It quoted the Home ministry spokesperson Ira Joshi as saying that there were no plans to launch criminal proceedings against the BSF personnel in the video.

Question is, all those prepared to defend national interest as well as India’s rise to regional power status – well, where are they?

The video, just over 11 mins long, has graphic scenes of nudity and violence. It shows a posse of BSF men, very calmly and deliberately torturing an obviously poor cattle herder, a Bangladeshi by the name of Habibur Rehman. The video is of a piece with the torture by US soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Gharaib prison that created such a worldwide storm a couple of years ago.

According to the Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM), a Kolkata-based nongovernmental organisation that posted the video, the man was caught by the BSF’s 105th Battalion in Murshidabad district, presumably because he was trying to illegally cross the India-Bangladesh border.

Truth is, large tracts of the more than 4000 km-long border with Bangladesh is so porous that several Bangladeshi traders – including those selling Jamdani saris to Indian women in India’s upwardly mobile metros – pay as little as Rs 50 to the same BSF personnel to look the other way when they illegally cross the border. Few markers or concertina wire bundles separate the two countries.

Expectedly, the video has created a real storm in Bangladesh, with the opposition rising up against Awami League leader and prime minister Sheikh Hasina, whose wears her closeness to India as a badge. Dhaka was quick to protest in New Delhi when the video surfaced, with senior Bangladeshi diplomats being assured that the matter was being taken up in India “at the highest level.”

But is that diplomatic jargon for lip service and inaction? Truth is, Delhi has so far refused to take the shameful humiliation of the Bangladeshi man seriously, and from all accounts it is unlikely to.

If the relationship between Delhi and Dhaka – whatever’s left of it after West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee refused to allow PM Manmohan Singh to sign the Teesta accord with Hasina, thereby sending ties into a total tailspin – takes a further tumble, certainly, the BSF will be to blame.

But more than the BSF, it may be time to point the finger inwards, at the deathly silence within. India’s middle-class is usually in the vanguard of progress and change, but this time around it has miserably failed to take on the all-powerful establishment that thinks nothing of impairing the honour and dignity of one Bangladeshi man.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Jyoti Malhotra would like to wake to the sounds of classical music, but there are the kids to get ready for school. Over the whirlwind that comprises the following 24 hours, she finds time to dream about building the Republic of Saket, re-reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories and perchance, creating a cookbook that would chart Narayani Kutty Unnikrishnan's journey from the Malabar uplands to Moscow.

Jyoti Malhotra would like to wake to the sounds of classical music, but there are the kids to get ready for school. Over the whirlwind that comprises the fo. . .